Glossary

Miração

Miração is the word Santo Daime uses for the visionary states the sacrament can open — the tradition's term for a kind of inner seeing that ordinary waking attention does not reach.

Where the word comes from

Mestre Irineu, the founder of Santo Daime, is credited with coining the term. It builds on the Portuguese verb mirar, to gaze at or contemplate — the same root that gives mirante, a lookout point high enough to take in a wide landscape. Miração fuses that idea of contemplation (mira) with ação, action, so the word itself holds looking and doing together.

Practitioners describe it as a term that named something Irineu had lived through directly, during his own early visionary experiences with the sacrament, rather than a concept borrowed from elsewhere.

Seeing and acting at once

Within the tradition, a miração is understood as more than a passing image or hallucination. It is described as carrying both a contemplative dimension — insight, symbol, recognition — and an active one, in which the visionary content is meant to inform how a person moves through their own life afterward.

Daimistas also speak of the need for discernment: distinguishing a genuine miração from ordinary imagination, wishful thinking, or mental projection is treated as a skill developed over time within the tradition, not something automatic.